Trip to Costa Rica makes a marriage

There's one sure way to learn whether the person you plan to marry is truly right for you: Go abroad together.

The woman in my life had taken me seriously when I proposed on three glasses of red wine at a restaurant back home. Then she began casting around for an exotic place we could tour before immersing ourselves in the hell of wedding planning.

Jessie speaks Spanish, and I understand most of the polite words, so Spain seemed like a logical destination. But the airfare was a bear. The sensible alternative: the Central American nation of Costa Rica.

All I can say now is: Before the trip, Jessie started sentences with, "When we get married ... "

Afterward, it was, "If we get married ... "

We are married indeed, and have since managed to visit France and the Pacific Northwest without damaging our relationship, but it astonishes me that Jessie can now laugh and say, "Go ahead — write about our trip to Costa Rica."

Really? Write about the missing passport, the poisonous snake, the hookers, the 90-minute bus trips that last three hours?

"Not the missing passport," Jessie says.

Well, OK. It involves a bathroom stall in Newark Airport and really isn't fit for this section, anyway.

I should say right off that when it comes to natural beauty, Costa Rica delivers as advertised, from the vast, symbiotic tangles of tree, vine, plant and moss under the rain forest canopy to the sun-drenched valleys of coffee shrubs.

We chose to make the capital, San Jose, our base of operations, and we traveled east from there into the rain forest, and west from there to the Pacific coast, getting the taste of three lands in one.

Costa Rica gives the impression of the still-gawky debutante who's the belle of the ball: a country aware of its own assets and hungry to cash in on them. Consequently, it seems poised to be tipped one way or the other, toward elegance or toward greed, sprawl and chaos.

Newspaper advertisements and occasional roadside signs offer for sale remote tracts of land as beautiful as Hawaii, and the notion of Getting Away From It All is not lost on the casual visitor. A young woman sitting by herself at a beachside restaurant asks the waiter, "If I had $20,000 to spend, is there a nice property I could get?" He shrugs — the way a man who doesn't have $20,000 will shrug — and says it depends.

Some of the hilly, shack-pocked countryside outside the capital has a frontier feel to it. Meanwhile, the beach town we visit is scrambling to put up more hotels at the end of its unpaved, rain-puddled roads. And somewhere out at sea, drug smugglers from Colombia are being picked off by the U.S. Coast Guard on Costa Rica's behalf before they can reach the shore.

The heart of the capital city of San Jose may be the country's least-beautiful spot, with its thick cords of buses, minivans and sedans choking two-lane streets between motley lineups of low buildings, all of different pale colors and many topped by barbed wire.

Kiosks dot the sidewalks, offering everything from plantains to duplicate house keys. Only blocks from the city's Plaza de la Cultura are unlit, unmarked streets prowled at night by a handful of women in heels and tight skirts.

It is in one of these areas that we find the hotel we have chosen, via the Internet.

Inside its locked iron fence, the hotel itself, a former coffee plantation house, is a gem. I turn out to be a pretty fidgety fiance once I find that Jessie likes trekking off by herself, camera in hand, to learn the lay of the land while I'm still sleeping. She returns to report she has found a supermarket and a gorgeous old movie theater (the century-old Cine Variedades) along with a ton of tourist stores.

Jessie does a little fidgeting herself after we take a tour bus from San Jose for the country's "cloud forest" (a more-misty version of the rain forest) and a chance to ride the zip lines, which I've always wanted to try since I saw Sean Connery gliding under the canopy in the film "Medicine Man."

The guide shows everyone in our tour group how to grip the lanyard and reach up to brake yourself as you whisk along the cable between wood platforms high above the forest floor. As she takes her turn learning, Jessie, I find out later, is terrified, but she never shows it.

Then it's our turn to be unnerved together. We are on one of those platforms between zips, waiting to attach our harnesses to the tramline, when the assistant guide who has gone before us spots something on the next landing.

It's a brown, mottled snake, perhaps six inches long and barely thicker than a twig. He shouts a few words in Spanish that I can't translate.

Our guide quickly grabs a stick, joins him, and artfully moves the snake to a leaf a few feet from the platform, from where the rest of us can admire it.

I've read there are 17 potentially lethal snakes in the country, and our guide cheerfully says that the smaller they are, the quicker their venom will kill you. This one could put an end to wedding planning in a hurry.

But that's the only hiccup through several hours of zipping and aerial-tram-riding in the forest. The forest is lovely, dark and deep — sparing of sunlight (few flowers are able to produce vivid color) and, on this particular occasion, as quiet as anyplace on the planet.

As we gaze at the broad leaves and twisting trunks, Jessie says she can hear the trees breathe. I lean toward her and whisper, "With fronds like these, who needs anemones?"

Ah, this is a man who should be left to the howler monkeys, she probably thinks — but for my sake she chuckles. And I know she's the one.